Sep 12 2010
Week 3 Framing Questions
- Jack and Vickers tell us that a paradigm is “a generally held belief that dominates thinking in a discipline” and that various theories can be within one paradigm. What paradigm’s (umbrella set of assumptions or way of thinking about an aspect of the world) can we analyze in the transition from old to new media?
- It’s interesting that prior to “penny press” newspaper, communication wasn’t ‘mass communication’ or in other words, it was personal and without aid from a resource that reached a larger audience. What type of ‘new’ media sources were personal before massed to populations?
- In chapter 5, the authors discuss what makes mass communication “mass.” In the late 1990s, the authors tell us that “the Internet ‘didn’t fit researchers’ ideas about mass media; however, if you really study the definition of mass communication in their words- traditional mass communication and new media are almost one-in-one. With that said, it seems like one of the bigger issues researchers were afraid of was change without a predetermined purpose. Perhaps initial researchers were afraid to collaborate the two very similar media and accept that it was more evolutionary. Would you agree?